Several years ago, a mission team of laypersons preached the morning sermon at First Baptist Church of Abilene, Texas. They had just returned from completing medical and construction projects at a small Christian hospital in the mountains near Chihuahua, Mexico.

Their stories of building much-needed medicine cabinets and relationships, repairing clinic doors and broken bodies, and salvaging discarded equipment and forgotten lives touched our affluent congregation profoundly. In one testimony, a family physician summarized how he viewed their missionary efforts in that needy setting: “Some will call what we did the ‘Social Gospel’; I just call it ‘obedience.’”

This mention of the Social Gospel more than a decade ago highlights a misunderstanding that has been perpetuated by evangelical leaders and churches for a century. Quite recently, in fact, a friend told me that the “true gospel” is salvation through Jesus Christ, and not just doing good works.

But I contend that the true gospel is social. It has a personal aspect, of course, yet the implications of the true gospel are social. The first and greatest commandment is to love God with all our heart, soul and mind — and, for Christians, that means loving Jesus as the Incarnate Word, the human face of God. But the second mandate, as ultimate as the first, is to love our neighbors as we love ourselves (Matthew 22:36-40) — which grounds the social nature of the gospel in the person of Jesus himself.